Abstract: The feasibility of classifying satellite radar altimeter waveforms by cluster analysis is validated.According to the characteristic of radar waveforms,moving minimum Euclidean distance is proposed to be the similarity index for cluster analysis.This method can efficiently classify the radar waveforms.Taking the Topex/Poseidon coastal waveforms as an example,we compare four cluster analysis methods,such as single linkage,complete linkage,average linkage and Ward linkage.Results show that the Ward linkage cluster analysis is better than the others.